Hawai'i Tech
Making sense of computer geek speak

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

•	Buying business computers The second, free "Plain Talk About Technology" will cover how to purchase business computers wisely: 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Aug. 22, Neal Blaisdell Center, Hawai'i Room 1 Reservations: 479-5635

Well, no. But that description sure communicated the idea more clearly than prattling on about Ethernet hubs, LANs, VPNs and bits per second.

"Hello, Alan?" David Kobashigawa barked into the cup. "Can you hear me?" Then he moved the cup to his ear.

Alan Lam, at the other end of the string, shifted his cup to his mouth. "Yes," he intoned into the cup, "I hear you."

If this sounds vaguely reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell's famous first phone conversation with Mr. Watson, it's probably because computers basically talk over phone lines, too. But nobody associates computers with simple concepts.

And that's why Lam, Kobashigawa and other techies around town have launched a series presenting "Plain Talk About Technology." At the first, last week, they concentrated on talking plainly about computer networks, the principal way most working humans intersect with the seeming inhumanity of the silicon chip.

Part of the inhumanity seems to reside not in the hardware, however, but in some of the humans inhabiting positions of tech expertise. Both Lam, president of the technology consulting group Q-Communications Ltd., and Kobashigawa, organizer of the annual Pacific/Hawaii Computer Expo, admit that some techs have ulterior motives for using an alphabet soup of acronyms.

"Sometimes people do it to appear smarter," Lam said. "But basically, we're just lazy. We don't want to say the whole word."

They turned to the paper cups, and after impersonating two computers talking to each other, they knotted another pair of cups to their own pair. The knot, Lam said, essentially functions like the network hub, which is merely a device for connecting computers.

If one person calls another via the cup network, Kobashigawa said, probably only that person will answer but all on the network will hear the voice coming through the cup. Similarly, computers routinely send out information that is retrieved by another single computer, he said, but the data is flowing throughout the network, which is how hackers do their mischief.

With the addition of switches, the communication can go directly from one computer to another, in the way that a high-end, two-way radio can address a specific handset in the system, Lam added. He demonstrated with a Nextel cell phone, which has an addressable two-way radio built in.

In the cup model, you can send more information faster by speaking more quickly, but there is a limit to how fast anyone can talk, Lam said. Similarly, conventional phone lines carry data in a stream of tones which can be transmitted only so fast before they all become mushy and unintelligible, he said. This is why Internet connections via regular phone lines, using a dial-up modem, can't be pushed much faster than 56kbps (kilobits per second).

Other forms of cable, such as the fiber optics of the Road Runner system or digital subscriber lines (DSL), have sped up these connections. Still, Kobashigawa said, the delivery of data is only as fast as the weakest link along the Internet pathway between your computer and the source of the data.

"Wherever the pipe is kinked," he said, "that's how fast you're going to go."

The presenters also clarified additional points of confusion:

• A computer's RAM, or random access memory, is akin to a human brain's capacity to recall information instantly; the hard drive is the "big book" in which you have to look up what you can't recall off the top of your head.
• The cache memory is that smaller memory bank that speeds short-term recall. If you cut text from one word-processing document and paste it into another, those data had been stored for that brief period in the cache.
• A VPN, or virtual private network, is a way of transmitting information privately over a public network, using encryption. Think of it as two people communicating privately across a crowded room, Kobashigawa said,in a foreign language that only they understand.

"They're meant for techie people to communicate with each other, instead of for confusing people, although we end up confusing people at the same time."